Untitled #2

In Untitled #2, Agnes Martin engages with a newly found compositional confidence and innovative use of color. From the first series the artist made after an eight year hiatus from painting, now reinvigorated by the natural grandeur surrounding her New Mexican home and studio, Martin confronts the canvas with the self-assurance of vision that marks out her mature career. Untitled #2 showcases a radical departure in compositional arrangement for the artist, with her trademark bands of color arranged vertically rather than horizontally. In the present example, Martin has placed wide bands of pale pink within a standard, 72-inch square canvas, which she first covers in gesso before applying the pigment. The appearance of the painting changes depending on the viewer’s position to it. The composition's apparent unity when seen from a distance dissolves upon close inspection, the brightness of the pink, its ever-so-slightly modulated texture, as well as the wavering graphite lines that delineate each column revealing themselves to the viewer. This contrast, between the economy of its limited palette, and the touch of the artist’s hand, is one of the single greatest gifts of Martin’s work. Experiencing the painting first hand, the canvas opens up to spread beyond its borders and almost float outward beyond the picture plane. Indeed, “looking at Martin’s art is something of an art in itself,” the art critic Peter Schjeldahl has written, one that is “motivated by continual, ineffable rewards” ("Agnes Martin: A Matter of Fact Mystic,” The New Yorker, 10 October 2016).

Despite its Minimalist appearance, in Untitled #2 Martin applies her paint in visible brushstrokes, embracing comparatively vibrant pigments over her formerly austere palette. She appears to be toying with light itself across the surface of the canvas, establishing with time an illusionary sense of infinite space here quite apart from the direct flatness of her previous work. Arne Glimcher, after seeing this series, describes her earlier work as “chaste in comparison,” noting the “sensuality that flows freely over the surfaces of the new canvases… these were hot” (“Studio visit. April 30, 1976. Cuba, New Mexico,” in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, London, 2012, p. 76).

Martin had disengaged from the art world just after first receiving critical and popular acclaim in 1967, embarking instead on an eighteen month adventure across North America. She did not return to painting until 1974, and the present work emerges from this first painterly resurgence where Martin revitalizes her practice with an array of brighter, beautiful monochromatic colors. Describing the results of her self-imposed isolation and new body of color-forward work, Glimcher writes: "This [was a] joyful reinvention of her process, and would continue for the next nineteen years” (quoted in Agnes Martin: The Distillation of Color, Pace Gallery, New York; accessed March 12, 2025, Online). At this stage in her practice, Martin also alters her titling process, steering away from her previous practice of using descriptive names and instead designating each finished canvas simply as Untitled and a number corresponding to the work’s series. Martin’s creativity stemmed from a powerful, idiosyncratic aesthetic philosophy relating to the interrelationship vis-à-vis notions of perfection, beauty, and happiness. Martin best stipulated this approach at a 1989 lecture, stating that “when I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is an awareness of perfection” (quoted in “Beauty is the Mystery of Life,” in Agnes Martin, Whitney Museum of American Art, exh. cat., 1992, p. 10).

Untitled #2 was first presented along with Untitled #11 at Martin's triumphant exhibition Recent Paintings at Pace Gallery in 1976. Anne H. and Sid R. Bass acquired the present work directly from the show, then obtained Untitled #11 soon after, awed by the powerful preferentiality the two works hold when placed together in dialogue. These works perfectly convey Martin's essentialist visual ideal, employing beauty espoused by perfectly rendered linear elements, distilling these potent emotions in order to inspire happiness in the beholder. The work elegantly demonstrates Martin at her technical best, reflecting her years of solitary reflection and her new embrace of the empty New Mexican plateau where she situated her new studio. Liberated from worldly concerns and embarking on a novel artistic path, the present work demarcates the beginning of Martin’s mature career.